Oracle continues growth-by-acquisition with purchase of ClearApp

Oracle Corporation today announced that it was buying application-management software vendor ClearApp. The price was not revealed. The deal is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close before the end of the year.

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ClearApp sells QuickVision, which provides integrated service and performance management for J2EE programs running on application servers, including IBM's WebSphere and Oracle subsidiary BEA's Weblogic.

With nearly 80,000 staff and 2007 revenues of over £10bn, Oracle Corporation is the world's largest enterprise software company; only the less-specialised Microsoft and IBM are bigger. Although Oracle is best known for its eponymous database, it is also strong in other types of software and services for large businesses, including development tools and financial, manufacturing, resources and personnel management. The company is growing rapidly by acquisition and in recent years has absorbed Siebel, PeopleSoft and J D Edwards among many others – seven companies so far this year and 11 in 2007.

ClearApp's QuickVision will become part of Oracle's range of application management tools. It already works with Oracle Enterprise Manager. This is Oracle's management flagship, a suite of tools to configure and manage both its own and third-party applications running on application servers and compute grids.

The ClearApp purchase is part of Oracle's investment in the fast-growing area of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA is a method of building business applications out of multiple separate modules or "services", typically written in Java, which link together by Web Services - the exchange of WSDL-formatted XML messages over SOAP or other protocols carried over HTTP.

(lghp)